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2002/12/17 - David Faure
KDE
An interview conducted by Alain Buret
Alain Buret - Please present yourself !
David Faure - I'm french, aged 26. I studied computer science in an "Engineering School" called INSA, in Lyon. I lived two years in England, and came back to the south of France a year ago, to enjoy a bit more of the sun and the family.
Alain Buret - How did you get involved in KDE ? How does all of this started ?
David Faure - Four years ago, I started writing a talk program with an answering machine capability A friend had shown me KDE a week before, I thought I would use KDE to create a message box for the talk daemon. Yes, it all started from a message box ! But I really got involved in KDE when Torben Weis was looking for someone to take over kfm's maintainance (kfm is the file manager in KDE 1.1) and I said I would give it a try. Since then I've been working on KParts (component model), KIO (network transparency), KHTML/KJS (web browsing) to improve Konqueror, and also on KOffice, especially the word processor (KWord).
Alain Buret - You are currently working for MandrakeSoft ... what's your primary job ?
David Faure - Since January 2003 I'm no longer working for MandrakeSoft, but for Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB (don't try to pronounce that, just say "KDAB" like everyone else). This is Kalle Dalheimer's company. I'm still working 50% of my time on KDE and KOffice, sponsored by TrollTech. The other 50% I'm working on Qt/KDE-related commercial projects for KDAB.
Alain Buret - How many KDE developers are being employed like you, not only at MandrakeSoft ?
David Faure - MandrakeSoft employs Laurent Montel, who works mostly on KOffice. SuSE employs Waldo Bastian, who works on KDE (in particular the core libraries). For full-time developers, I think that's about it. But I think some other developers are, like me now, paid part-time by their employer for working on KDE.
Alain Buret - How do you see the future of KDE, Gnome and the other window managers ? Will they have to become more and more "compatible" ?
David Faure - I see work going on in that direction. Mailing-lists and meetings are happening to this effect. RedHat pushes this a lot, but it seems that other people are also interested in this.
Alain Buret - What kind of program would you really love to develop ?
David Faure - Interesting question.... Developing a complete word processor is a lot of fun in itself, and hard work. I like when development involves designing new classes. This hasn't happened much when I was working on Konqueror, but is definitely the case with KOffice. There's so much to do there.... I don't know what else I'd like to be doing - if I did, I would be doing it :-)
Alain Buret - Using any Gnome application ? And why ?
David Faure - I don't use any Gnome application, simply because the KDE applications, or the command line tools, provide everything I need. But I totally understand if KDE users have to use a Gnome application because they don't know the command line tools, and no KDE application fulfills the need ;-)
Alain Buret - What do you expect from your FOSDEM presentation ?
David Faure - I hope that people will enjoy learning some interesting tips and tricks with KDE. For both users and developers, there is surely much that they don't know yet about KDE. My hope is that after learning a bit more about the amazing number of possibilities and "cool stuff" in KDE, more people will start using KDE if they don't do so already and will also contribute to it.
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